Retrieving RSS with JavaScript

I’ve open sourced RSS to API, which allows you to retrieve RSS feeds via JavaScript. With a few clicks, you can deploy it to Heroku and start consuming RSS from your JavaScript code!

Almost any site with an RSS fee returns a reverse-chronological list of items, each containing a title, link, and date. This consistency can be powerful. You can create a dashboard with the latest feed item(s) from multiple sites. You can bring your corporate web site’s news items on your intranet. The possibilities are limited only by what is available online.

In many cases, it makes sense to grab RSS feeds via JavaScript and display them in the browser. However, cross-domain restrictions generally prevent direct retrieval of feeds via JavaScript. The Google Feed API provided an easy way to retrieve feeds with JavaScript, but it was deprecated in April of 2015 and could disappear at any moment. Alternatives like the Feedly API do not accept requests directly from JavaScript.

To consume RSS in JavaScript, it’s necessary to route it through a server. Your JavaScript communicates with a server, which retrieves the feed and returns it. Google Feed API is going away, and it’s a pain to build your own, so I’m releasing RSS to API. It’s a lightweight Ruby app that accepts requests for feeds and implements caching to serve them quickly. With just a few clicks, you can deploy it onto Heroku’s free plan (you’ll want to up your plan to use this in production).

RSS to API has been tested with dozens of feeds on one page. See the example below, which might lag because Heroku’s free plan has to go to sleep once in a while.